TomArra.com

While I am not an avid reader by any stretch of the word I have been reading more and more thanks to my Kindle Paperwhite. The experience is great and is a lot easier to carry then actual paperback or hardcover books.

Masters of Doom lays out the story of what is easily the best programming duo of the 1990’s, John Carmack and John Romero. The book starts out describing both Carmack and Romero’s childhoods and how they came to meet each other. It changes pace quickly are starts to rip through the timeline as the duo creates id Software and proceed to release hit after hit on the newly growing PC platform.

I personally love any biography books which take place in the early days of the PC industry as it’s something that tends to really get lost in today’s fast moving mobile world. A lot of people don’t remember how crazy 3D graphics were back in the 90’s. While this book doesn’t get into the details on how every new game engine was developed you do get a sense of how in awe everyone was of John Carmack and his Doom/Quake engines.

Overall this was a quick read, but very good. Highly recommended especially if you ever played Wolfenstein 3D, Doom, or Quake.

Masters of Doom on Amazon

I decided to jump in with both feet on this one so let’s see how it goes.

New Look – The whole site is now run in WordPress. I know this seems like a cop-out being that I am an engineer but I figure this time around I would rather focus on the content of the site instead of trying to maintain something so let’s give this a shot.

New Host – I’m moving away from my old hosting (Dreamhost) not because it was bad but because I wanted something more flexible. So DNS work has gone to DNSimple and the hosting has moved over to Azure.

New Content – Let’s see if I can actually keep a commitment for once :)

The Android OS is great, in theory. The original thought behind Android was to create an open source mobile operating system that was free to use in order to get a basic OS standard in the mobile space. When Google bought the Android group it followed the path for a while. Most Android devices that came out all looked the same, software wise, and functioned the same. Slowly though OEM’s have started to pre-install their custom applications and have now started to re-skin the entire OS in order to fit their branding needs.

Android is an open operating system, its was designed for this. But consumers have forgot one thing, Google still makes the OS and the default UI but they never get to see it anymore.

Recently The Verge posted this article about how to get the stock look back on any Android device. While it only takes 3 apps, most of which are free, one question always popped up in my head. Shouldn’t it be the other way around? Why not start with the stock UI and let users decide if they want your companies branding all over it.

On a daily basis I am using Git on Windows and while I could use the command line for everything I find it much nicer to be able to see the git commit log all the time. After trying a few different tools I found Git Extensions to be a great Git GUI when pared with P4Merge for diff and merging. But out of the box Git Extensions only supports P4Merge as a merge tool, not a diff tool. Well it only take a simple change to your .gitconfig file to get it working.

[diff]
tool = p4merge
guitool = p4merge
[difftool "p4merge"]
cmd = "p4merge.exe $LOCAL $REMOTE"

By default Git Extensions set’s up kdiff3 as the guitool so hitting F3 wont pull up P4Merge. My setting the diff.guitool at P4Merge it all just magically starts working.

In this past year there have been a few great websites created to learn to write code. None have been as good as Codeacademy. While it only get’s you started in programming logic it does it in a simple way that just about anybody can understand. And in order to get even more people excited about and learning about writing code they have started Code Year.

The premise is simple. Every week a new programming lesson will be e-mailed to you and you have a week to complete it. By the end of the year you should have enough general programming knowledge to be able to pick up a book on a new language and hit the ground running. Over 200,000 people have already signed up and are ready to start learning, including myself. While I am already a professional software engineer it never hurts to keep learning, or at the very least keep practicing.